Trees at Night

StevenV

I was out driving this evening and passed this tree, lit by the street light. I had to come back after finishing the errands and see what I could do with it. This is my first attempt shooting at night (other than sports under the lights), so let me have it - what works, what doesn't.

I know that the lights are blown; I tried many exposures but didn't find a way to get enough of the tree without that happening.


taken at 21:39:30
Shutter: 6 sec, Aperture: 11, ISO: 100
Exposure mode: Manual, Flash: Off
Lens: 28 to 80mm, Focal length: 28mm

nburwell

Nice job, Steven. Couple suggestions that I would make: I would straighten out the horizon, it seems to be favoring the left side. What WB (white balance) setting did you have this on? It looks a bit yellowish in tone to me on my laptop screen. Other than me being nit-picky I think you did a pretty good job for this being your first night shot attempt. Keep up the work!

StevenV

nburwell wrote:

Nice job, Steven. Couple suggestions that I would make: I would straighten out the horizon, it seems to be favoring the left side. What WB (white balance) setting did you have this on? It looks a bit yellowish in tone to me on my laptop screen. Other than me being nit-picky I think you did a pretty good job for this being your first night shot attempt. Keep up the work!

Thanks for the look and comments.

I'd forgotten and left the camera on AWB, so I used PS's Tungston setting when importing the RAW, but perhaps I could have worked it a little more.

As for the horizon, I straightened to the light pole figuring that would be the most distracting if it wasn't "right." The whole setting is on the side of a small hill so there isn't a perfect tilt, I'm afraid.

The good news is that, as long as there's no breze to wave the branches or to knock off all those nice blossoms, I've got a couple of more nights to try to do even better.

-S

Dixie

Steven, if you would like to get more detail from the tree and keep from blowing the lights you can try the following:

1. Take a reading from the light.
2. Take a reading from the lower center mass on the tree.
3. Place your camera on a tripod.
4. Put your camera in manual mode.
5. Take one exposure for with the settings for the light.
6. Take a second exposure being careful not to move or shift the camera any using the settings for the tree.
7. Use your editing software to layer the two exposures with the exposure for the lights on the bottom and the layer exposed for the tree on top.
8. Make the top layer active.
9. Set your eraser to 50-50.
10. Selectively erase over and around the lights until you make the layer on the bottom visible in the erased area blending the correct exposure for the lights with the correct exposure for the tree.
11. Once finished with your blending then you can flatten the image to one layer.